Point-and-click adventure games have their own set of frustrating quirks: the puzzles tend to require dream logic, for instance, or there is a lot of arbitrary clicking around the screen in search of the game designer's intended hotspot. But the most salient hallmark of the genre, probably, is that of the main character's frequent, inevitable death.

Player death is an obvious, even lazy way to reinforce the player's investment in his own in-game decisions -- whether he remembers to chug a cup of coffee could mean life or death! -- but in the case of Phantasmagoria, every death, every minor failure, is, in a giddily gruesome way, its own macabre little reward.

Phantasmagoria was released in 1995 at the apogee of the FMV "interactive movie" fad. Actors typically mimed even their most minor in-game actions -- including their deaths -- in front of a blue screen, lending that genre a surreal, operatic cheesiness. David Craddock notes that Phantasmagoria's narrative action "often culminated in controversial and grotesque scenes made all the more real by the fact that real actors, not animated characters, were involved."

In a Phantasmagoria retrospective that concentrates on the game's failings as much as anything else, Craddock continues,

Dozens of bad choices on the part of the player brought about gory consequences for Adrienne. In one death sequence, an imprisoned demon bursts through a door, grabs Adrienne's face with both of its powerful claws, and pulls in either direction, effortlessly ripping her head into bloody bits of flesh, bone, and brain matter. In another, Adrienne's possessed paramour ties her to a chair and throws a lever, prompting a scythe to swing down and split her head not-so-neatly down the middle. In the same scene, players can cause Adrienne to commit suicide by pulling the lever themselves.

Phantasmagoria was rereleased just last week as a US$10 download.

[Editorial: Smoke, Mirrors and the Phantasmagoria]
And see also:
[The Wonderful Murders In: Roberta Williams' Phantasmagoria!]
[Games that scarred me for life: Phantasmagoria]